Adoption Motivations

Stage 2 Adoption Assessment: Session 5

What are our motivations to adopt? That was the key question to this session. It could have been a very short one with the answer of “we want to have a family” but it’s not as simple as that, and although that is the main underlying reason for us wanting to adopt it is not the clear cut, bottom line, black and white answer that it would appear to be.

We were questioned about how long we have wanted to have children, why we were looking to adopt now and not earlier or later, which of us first brought up the possibility of adopting and whether we had looked at other options. All of which was fairly easy to answer.

Much of it they already knew from the Stage 1 Workbook that they have as we had to answer similar questions to those above in brief for that, but this allowed them to go into more detail and fill in any blanks that they had. I am saying ‘they’ now rather than ‘she’ because our social worker is still a student so, for this session, she was being monitored by the senior practitioner assigned to us – she was very quiet which she said felt a bit strange as she is used to running the assessment herself. Based on some of the things the senior practitioner said our social worker had definitely been discussing things with her (as she is meant to be to ensure she’s getting all the information they need for our PAR).

A question we floundered on a bit because we hadn’t discussed it was who would look after our children if something happened to both of us. We blagged the answer, but it was clear we hadn’t discussed it with anyone and I’m kicking myself for not having done so because I’ve seen on other blogs that that is something that gets asked. We agreed to discuss it and let her know the outcome of that at the next session.

We talked about our childcare experience, concentrating mostly on the babysitting we’ve done for some of our friends. She said she wants to go into more details about that at a later session (the one after next as we’ve only got two left scheduled).

I am happy to say that our social worker seems to love our dogs, last session she even asked to take them home with her. I suspect it’s because our youngest is very manipulative with his cute face, and she’s fallen for it hook, line and sinker. We thought, as both social workers were there, we’d show them the dogs’ dinner time routine, which went as planned (phew) with both dogs sitting next to each other with a full bowl of food each waiting to be told they can start eating. They’re very good like that, but we didn’t go that step further of leaving them in the room alone with the food which ordinarily would be fine (they still wait to be told!) but with the extra people there they may have felt their dinner was threatened and got in there as quickly as possible.

Next session is about our expectations of the adoption process, and we’ve been sent a form to fill in about what we would find acceptable and unacceptable in a child we’d look to adopt and their history/situation. This is things like type of contact required with the birth family, child’s family history (e.g. parental schizophrenia, parental learning difficulties, etc), child’s existing medical condition (e.g. HIV status, autism, cerebral palsy etc), the child’s past experience (e.g. neglect, physical abuse etc) and any current or anticipated special needs (e.g. developmental delay, learning difficulties, behavioural difficulties etc). I suspect this is going to be hard and we’re going to have to look at it a bit emotionlessly and decide what we think we’ll be able to cope with.

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